Thomas Cole, American artist and poet, was born in Lancashire, England in 1801 and moved with his family to the United States at the age of seventeen. Once here, Cole’s father was forced to relocate often to keep his dry-goods business viable. Cole moved from Philadelphia to Ohio and back, and on to New York. Not suprisingly, the wilderness that confronted him in America was in sharp contrast to that of Lancashire, which had been industrialized since the eighteenth century. For Cole, this new world provided a source of inspiration for the development of his art and his poetry, and set the foundation for what was to become the first truly American school of painting.

Cole was largely self-taught and began painting portraits to earn a living. It was not until 1825 that he first exhibited landscape paintings, one of which immediately caught the eye of engraver and artist Asher Durand, who immediately purchased it. Commissions soon followed, and Cole’s list of patrons included some of the wealthiest and most influential men of the period. Among them were Daniel Wadsworth of Hartford; Luman Reed, a wealthy New York merchant for whom Cole painted his great allegorical series Course of Empire (1833-6); and Samuel Ward, a New York banker and deeply religious man for whom Cole designed another allegorical series entitled The Voyage of Man, for which the Smith painting is one of several studies.

Thomas Cole was a particularly complex and interesting figure who sought spiritual and personal solitude through a communion with nature yet was exceptionally well connected in artistic, literary and social circles. In addition to painting and writing, he read widely. In Lancashire, he had had a strong liberal arts education and was well versed in the major British and European writers. In the U.S. he drew inspiration from new authors, especially the American Romantics such as Hawthorne and Melville. Cole’s diaries, letters, prose and poetry provide insight into his working methods and motivation. Evident within those pages are Cole’s resistance to the aggressive expansion of industry and materialism in the United States and his regret for just how much of this "new Eden" had already been lost. His writing also indicates "a strong literary and moralizing component that bound nature and imagination together in a complex and unstable unity." ¹

Cole is credited with being one of the early leaders of what became known as the Hudson River School of painting. This group of American landscape painters worked between about 1825 and 1870 and shared a sense of national pride as well as an interest in celebrating the unique natural beauty found in the United States. However, differences in individual artistic preferences and working styles were common. For example, Asher Durand preferred intimate scenes and delicate lighting while Thomas Doughty liked lyrical scenes of the valley. Although their emphasis was on plein-air painting, careful observation and naturalistic rendering of the American landscape, Thomas Cole was also free to ground his own style in past tradition and emphasize the more sublime aspects of nature. For example, although he made sketches and oil studies on site, he preferred to prepare precise outline drawings for studio compositions, modifying and combining his studies to produce a synthetic landscape built partly of the imagination and often filled with symbolic imagery and emotionally charged visions that depict the awesome grandeur of the natural world. William Cullen Bryant stated in his eulogy for Thomas Cole, "his sketches were sometimes but the slightest notes of his subject, often unintelligible to others, but to him luminous remembrances from which he would afterwards reconstruct the landscape…" ²

The Artwork

The Smith College painting is one of many studies for the third panel, Manhood, in Cole’s Voyage of Life series. Unlike Cole’s first major series, Course of Empire, which focused on the stages of civilization as a whole, the Voyage of Life series is a more personal, Christian allegory that interprets visually the journey of man through four stages of life: infancy, youth, manhood and old age. Cole describes the period of manhood:

"Trouble is characteristic of the period of Manhood. In childhood, there is no carking care: in youth, no despairing thought. It is only when experience has taught us the realities of the world, that we lift from our eyes the golden veil of early life; that we feel deep and abiding sorrow…the conflicting elements [in the picture] are the allegory; and the Ocean, dimly seen, figures the end of life, which the Voyager is now approaching."³

In the Smith study, Cole has concentrated on the compositional elements of the landscape only. The final version includes a frightened middle-age man in a small, rudderless boat. Alone and helpless at the mercy of the turbulent river, he clasps his hands and raises his eyes heavenward—almost a plea for mercy. His guardian angel, who appears in each panel, is seen watching over him from the bright area at the upper left hand corner of the composition. A host of demons appears against the dark and forbidding sky above the river, symbolizing the temptations and evils of manhood.

Cole had formulated this theme in his mind some years before he came in contact with Samuel Ward. Feeling that Ward could appreciate such an undertaking he drafted a proposal that included detailed descriptions of the overall theme as well as the subjects for each panel, and in 1839, Samuel Ward commissioned Cole to produce this series. Unfortunately, Ward died soon thereafter, but Cole did finish and exhibit the original series for the Ward family. He also painted small replicas (2 ft. x 3 ft.) of the 6 x 6 1/2 ft. originals. In 1841 he departed for Italy to improve his failing health and revitalize his artistic energies, and in Italy, he repaint the series in full size, from memory and a few sketches he had with him. His hopes of selling it in Europe were never realized although his 1842 exhibition in Italy was a success. Cole returned to the United States with the four paintings, lending them out on exhibition to museums and galleries in the Northeast. Currently, the locations of these three sets of the Voyage are located as follows:

• Original Ward Version: Museum of Art, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York
• 2’ x 3’ Replicas: Public and private collections
• 2^nd Italian Version: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

In the Smith College study, there is a strong emphasis on the diagonal: in the rocks which jut up, steep and forbidding, and the river which sweeps downward, threatening to carry anything in or on it over the precipitous drop to the twisting and foaming rapids in the mid-ground. The extreme narrowness of the passage between the two rock face heightens the tension as the viewer tries to determine whether or not a small craft could navigate these tumultuous waters.

It is only in the distant background that the viewer captures a glimpse of the horizon. This line, where the distant ocean meets the sunset colored sky, is the only horizontal line in the painting. Amidst the chaos and confusion of the wild scene in the foreground, one catches a glimpse of possible serenity. Cole has positioned this focal point just below and to the right of center. The combination of the lone horizontal and warm color in an otherwise dark and forbidding scene, beckons the viewer’s eye back again and again.

The silhouette of a gnarled tree trunk opposes the diagonals of the rocks and river, forcing the eye back into the scene. Here the twisted and rotting trunk is used, as it often is in Cole’s work, as a symbol for the savage (untamed) wilderness and all its dangers. The funnel-shaped cloud that appears above the tree leads the eye up into the forbidding clouds of the sky, over the top and to the left, where the downward arc of the clouds forces it back down again into the river.

Cole’s use of these unstable, erratic diagonals creates a vortex whose center lies at the sunset on the horizon. This instability creates a sense of intense energy and power—reflecting the unpredictability of nature, and symbolizing pictorially the uncertainty, fear and worries of manhood. Where the river, which flows through all four panels, carrying the Voyager along on his journey, represents life, the ocean symbolizes the end which lies ahead.

1. Jane Turner, ed. The Dictionary of Art,(New York: Macmillan, 1996) Volume 4, p. 549.
2. William Cullen Bryant, "Funeral Oration on the Death of Thomas Cole Before the National Academy of Design, May 4, 1848" in John W. McCoubrey’s American Art 1700-1960: Sources and Documents, (NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1965), p. 97.
3. Thomas Cole as quoted in Noble, p. 216.

Bibliography

Cole, Thomas. The Collected Essays and Prose Sketches/Thomas Cole. Tymn, Marshall, ed. St. Paul: The John Colet Press, 1980.

Noble, Louis Legrand. The Life and Works of Thomas Cole (1853). Reprinted in Elliot S. Vesell, ed. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964. Noble Legrand was a good friend of Robert Cole and later his biographer.

Parry, Ellwood C., III. The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988.

Powell, Earl A. Thomas Cole. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990.

Schweizer, Paul D. The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole: Paintings, Drawings and Prints. Exhibit Catalog. New York: Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art, 1985. SC/Art N6537 C593.A4 1985